Wednesday, January 29, 2014

'The author of The Blue Flower is an imaginative genius writing about what 'genius' is. She is an old person keeping her imagination fresh by writing about youth. And she is, also, an old person thinking about the end of life and the prospect of death..'

I will admit that I skimmed one or two of the sections in Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, specifically those giving a detailed analysis of the books, in order to read them again and come to these new appraisals with the novels fresh in my mind. I decided to turn to the final one first, The Blue Flower, so there will be no prizes for guessing which plant might feature in this week's Tales From the Potting Shed.

I have tried to write about The Blue Flower on here in the past and failed, there is much that it is hard to pin down on the page, and I am not sure I can do much better this time around because Hermione Lee says it all, thus even more original thought hard to come by. However I have been quietly mesmerised once more by the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Fritz) and his infatuation with the twelve year-old Sophie von Kuhn. The book is based on the true story of Fritz, educated at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and at Wittenberg, and in subjects designated by his father. Except Fritz, who would eventually become the German Romantic poet Novalis, has ideas of his own opting for history and philosophy over maths and law.

The book surely has the most celebrated opening of all Penelope Fitzgerald's novels as Fritz arrives at the family home with his student friend Dietmahler, only to find that washing day is in progress. It seems so innocuous, an unassuming everyday event, except when you only wash clothes once a year it's quite a kerfuffle, and no one likes to wash their dirty linen in public after all.

This my third reading of The Blue Flower and each time I see something different, almost read an entirely different book, now I see the women quite clearly. For all the patriarchal dominance of the eighteenth century...it is Fritz who receives the best education, not his sisters, the women danced off the page; strong women going quietly about the daily round, the domestic, the giving birth, the cooking, the illness, the chatelaines, the enablers, the carers, providing the common sense and the scaffolding for the men and for each other, and in their midst the child, the innocent that is Sophie.

Universally praised, chosen in nineteen end of year recommendations in 1995, and tipped to win every prize going, The Blue Flower was mysteriously ignored by prize list judges. I well recall Susan Hill giving a very honest account of this in the days when she wrote a blog, in fact I had printed it off and found it tucked in my copy of the book. Though no longer available online, the blog post was widely read back in 2006. Susan tells of arriving for the first judges' meeting of the very first Orange Prize sure in the knowledge that her fellow judges would agree that The Blue Flower was going to be a very hard book to beat. Faced with blank looks it became clear that no one shared her opinion, considering it a 'thin little historical novel by a middle class middlebrow writer.' Fighting the book's corner to no avail, it wasn't even shortlisted, and when, in her late seventies, a gracious and quietly modest, yet ultimately snubbed, Penelope Fitzgerald appeared at the inaugural Orange Prize awards ceremony, specifically to celebrate the prize and congratulate the winner, she must have risen head and shoulders above the rest.

The good news is that, according to Hermione Lee, The Blue Flower caused a 'perfect storm' in America, where they clearly know a great book when they read it...

'The novel caught fire; it became the book of the year, the book everyone wanted to read...'

Hailed as 'luminous and authentic,' in the New York Times (by Michael Hofmann no less) the U.S. critics began to call Penelope Fitzgerald 'the finest British writer alive,' before giving the novel the National Book Critics Circle award. Asked how she might celebrate Penelope Fitzgerald replied...

'... I certainly shan't do any ironing today.'

Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth on this side of the pond... if there is such a thing as poetic justice, surely that comes close.

I know plenty of people who struggle with Penelope Fitzgerald, may be the secret is not to try too hard, just watch and wait and above all to listen. Let the book do the work and see what happens. I find myself allowing space in my thinking as I read ...so easy, there is absolutely no clutter, no distractions, plenty of silences to hear what has not been said. I often wonder about my Desert Island Books and I think for sure I could cheat a little and ask to have The Complete Writings of Penelope Fitzgerald (yet to be published, they'd have to print one for me) and know I would never be bored.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Choosing my final read of one year and the first of the next is normally quite a palava. I want it to be sincere and meaningful, a sort of final summing up of another year of great books which I have been fortunate enough to read, and a platform to launch me into another. As it happened, having read half of Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald back in October and then rested, I picked the book up again and bridged it across 2013 and into 2014 and it all felt quite perfect.

I had stopped half way because it felt as if there was almost too much of this life to take in, maybe I felt a little like Penelope Fitzgerald standing in a field as a child...

'Sometimes, I was overwhelmed standing in a field under an open blue sky, by a kind of terror at the enormity of the turning of the earth...'

I could identify with that. We stand in the field up behind the house and say there's no mistaking the earth is round, we see from east to west without interruption, the curvature of the earth is obvious. It calls to mind notions of infinity and beyond and then some.

But there can be something of that terror associated with reading a biography of the life of a writer I have come to love too, and in a way I had felt overwhelmed (in a good way) by the detail. Setting aside the unique and slightly quirky Knox family into which Penelope Fitzgerald was born there was so much to feel...well sad about. Not least the war and its disruption for so many of plans and hopes and dreams. Penelope Knox, much to her family's surprise I suspect, married an Irish officer Desmond Fitzgerald in 1942, a dazzling charmer, but a man who was subsequently changed by the war.

As the couple settled down to a shabby-chic Bohemian lifestyle in post-war Hampstead, pottery classes, radio script-writing, reviews and mother hood beckoned for Penelope whilst Desmond went back to 'lawyering'. Living beyond their means and in dire financial straits the family suddenly upped sticks and moved to Southwold and from then on life really seemed to be a catalogue of disasters. In the midst of it all I could see was a proud,clever and intelligent woman whose own ambitions were constantly thwarted and under siege

The losses were profound; belongings, status and friends for the couple; schools, stability and security for the children and alongside Desmond's descent into alcoholism, walking loyally by with a sure foot was Penelope's fortitude and determination, she holding the family together through this abject poverty and hardship. Lesser mortals would have sunk without trace, faster than the family's houseboat which was there one morning when they all left for work and school, and gone when they all arrived home that evening.

Penelope herself comes across as devoted but severe, and certainly never effusive, she was not one for hugging and kissing, nor one for praising face to face, though read her letters to her daughters and the love and affection is all there in spades. Clearly emotion was much easier to write than say.

Through it all I got the definite impression that Penelope kept a secret kernel within herself, protected, nurtured and nourished with whatever crumbs of culture she could glean. Though her own needs were largely subsumed by those of her family, and the need to work to support them all, that nourishment took her to museums and exhibitions and entailed listening to the radio and reading. Her upbringing whilst privileged was also resourceful and emotionally self-contained, there was an inbuilt resilience which when called upon seems to have served her well.

And at this point I rested because I felt decidely melancholy for her.

Things picked up on my return to the book because Penelope, following the death of Desmond, starts writing and achieving moderate success, her first novel The Golden Child having been written through his final illness. I have much-treasured first editions of all her books, some signed, but somehow The Golden Child, with its rather odd dust jacket still feels the most special. It should all have been crowned in glory when Penelope won the Booker Prize for Offshore, but it is at this point that Hermione Lee exposes the literary world on its very worst behaviour. Penelope Fitzgerald's treatment by the literati after that win beggars belief, and there she was poor as a church mouse and with no handbag to take to the awards ceremony so she uses a sponge bag... by this time I really wanted to cry.

An array of personal anecdotes make for interesting reading...

'Those who did not like Penelope Fitzgerald found her reserved, perverse, mischievous, wilful and sharp-tongued. Those who did like her found her kind, wise, funny, reticent, brilliant and generous. But those two people were one person.'

The more I think about that the more I suspect that the reaction you received was much more about how Penelope Fitzgerald had assessed you in the first place; I would wager that through years of hardship she had become an exceptionally intuitive, astute and highly accurate judge of character. Her novels suggest as much, and Hermione Lee gives an excellent account of each book all cleverly woven into events in Penelope's life.

Scattered throughout the book, along with some wonderful photographs, are Penelope Fitzgerald's drawings. I hadn't realised quite what a gift she had for art, a unique and very endearing style of her own that belies the impression of a seemingly rather distant and unemotional woman. The sketches are astonishing, as pared down as her writing, yet full of love and comfort and warmth and closeness...

So there you have it, a biography that has really taken me to the beating heart of a life, and to the extent that I felt true sadness as Penelope Fitzgerald's health began to fail. When I read of her final series of ultimately fatal strokes, and her daughter sitting at her bedside reading Willam Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, and the two of them talking about the book together, well that was me done for.

I have visited Penelope Fitzgerald's grave in Hampstead, indeed a reader here went and placed some flowers there a while back. It is a lovely spot, the voices of the children in the school playground just over the wall ring around the cemetery..

'If the story begins with finding it must end with searching...' says Fritz to Sophie in The Blue Flower, and that is the book I pick up next at the start of another reading year.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Being the book group with a difference, and one that reads to themes rather than the same book, Endsleigh Salon had pondered the idea of One Author, One Book for some time, eventually deciding to give it a go. We would choose one author and we could each read whatever we fancied by said author for our March meeting....well, such a resounding success we plan to make it an annual event.

Now I can promise faithfully that it was not me who uttered the name first, but I was delighted when someone else did, and even more delighted when the rest of the group agreed, so that was settled... Penelope Fitzgerald.

I have read all the books bar Innocence which I am keeping back safe in the knowledge that for one last time, on one special day I know not when, I will read and savour that feeling I get on reading one of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels for the very first time. It is inexplicable and ridiculous I know, but it feels like walking on virgin snow, and once I start those footprints in the book there is no going back, the read cannot be undone and what we have is all there is. Subsequent reads will reveal layer after layer, but that first read creates a unique feeling of immediacy, a sense of really 'being' wherever I have been taken, something that feels so special to Penelope Fitzgerald's writing and which I think we all struggled to find the words to describe last Tuesday evening.

In the end I chose Human Voices because I remember it being very funny, and very sad by turns as Penelope Fitzgerald describes life inside the BBC during the Second World War and in House of Air and a piece called Curriculum Vitae, Penelope Fitzgerald's credentila for writing this book become evident...

'I left Oxford with an honours degree and might perhaps have stayed there, but it was 1938 and it hardly seemed like the right thing to do at the time. In 1939 I took a job at Broadcasting House...designed to look, and does look, like a great ship headed south, and in 1939, 'with the best engineers in the world, and acrew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale...'

A string of young girls make up what is known in-house as the Seraglio and it is clear that the sexist atmosphere is very much the norm for BBC 1941, and Penelope Fitzgerald, writing from her 1988 vantage point has a feminist perspective on it all. She knows exactly the moments to emphasise in order to make her point but in that discreet and unshowy way that she has.

'Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women...'

Broadcasting House immediately becomes BH and remains so throughout the book, the director becomes the RPD and thus I was admitted behind the scenes and into the closed shop that was the wartime BBC.

Recent court cases and accusations of ageism against some of the women presenters at the BBC makes me think plus ca change since 1941 etc, and if I'm honest I do look at some of today's male presenters and wonder whether women of the equivalent age, and shall we say of similarly 'weatherbeaten' countenance, would be found acceptable. If only the women had the chance to stay long enough to look weatherbeaten we might find out, but I sense most of them dispatched long before anno domini makes itself apparent... and I had written this before A.A.Gill's personal onslaught on Mary Beard, declaring her 'too ugly for television.'

Mary Beard is currently doing a fabulous and far more capable job of presenting the Romans to us on TV than I suspect A.A.Gill or anyone else could, and don't miss Mary's response. It is gracious and deliciously laced with intelligent and Romanesque revenge and I'm really hoping the contest can be staged in a sort of huge gladiatorial arena and with Clare Balding commentating of course. Interestingly I had only recently been thinking, in Team Middlemarch mode, about the personal slurs on George Eliot's looks, and the inevitable hurt it must have caused, and telling myself thank goodness that wouldn't happen nowadays...

Penelope Fitzgerald would have much to say about it all I feel sure, but meanwhile she keeps her focus firmly on wartime as Lise and Vi settle into the Seraglio in 1940, scurrying around the the flagship building designed to resemble a great liner, which makes the Eric Gill (sorry, we are a bit over Gill-ed today) figurehead of Ariel and Prospero even more significant. I couldn't help thinking of The Tempest, and storms and shipwrecks and this disparate group of castaways as the Corporation lurched from one hilarious moment to the next amid a sort of low-key atmosphere of chaos..

'The corridors were full of talks producers without speakers, speakers without scripts, scripts which by clerical error containd the wrong words or no words at all. The air seemed alive with urgency and worry.'

And as if broadcasting during a war wasn't difficult enough..

'Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is telling the truth. Without prompting the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and in the long run would be more effective..droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, telling, as far as possible, exactly what happened...'

That truth began with Big Ben, which must always be relayed from Westminster and chime live on the radio...'the real thing, never from a disc'. It's absence would be a sign to the public..'that the war has taken a seriously unpleasant turn.'

The fact that the mechanism froze in cold weather was neither here not there, a problem to be passed to the Ministry of Works.

And the BBC has power..

'As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion.'

As I have grown to appreciate with Penelope Fitzgerald's writing, the focus is often on lived lives rather than a linear plot and her uncanny ability to take me where she wants me to be, to watch it as it might really have been.

I think this might be what I mean by immediacy, others may interpret it differently. This feels like fiction at its best for me these days. A.S. Byatt and Elizabeth Taylor are spoiling me for anything less,

In fact plenty of note does happen in Human Voices too, some of it utterly hilarious.

The French General's live broadcast to the nation, as funny on my second reading as my first, the hunt for authentic sound effects during the Blitz feels so very ridiculously 1940s BBC, and all contrasted with moments of acute sadness. Meanwhile expect Penelope Fitzgerald's consummate wordsmithery, of the subtlest but most exquisitely simple and highly effective variety to stop you in your tracks.

... the typewriter slumbered.

And I think about it, those big old Remingtons, and yes they do.

Philip Hensher summarized like this...

“Fitzgerald has been widely and justifiably praised for the excellence, discretion and solidity of her historical imagination, which brings unlikely periods of history to life with unarguable, strange rightness.”

And it is that 'strange rightness' that I think many of us at the Endsleigh Salon were struggling to describe. Between us we had read Innocence, Offshore, The Beginning of Spring, The Blue Flower, The Gate of Angels, The Bookshop, The House of Air, The Means of Escape, and bar one dissenter who had dipped into the Collected Letters rather than the fiction and hadn't warmed, we were all of one accord.

A brilliant writer, and thanks to my fellow salonistas a brilliant and inspiring evening, and should your own book group be feeling a little stuck or stale I can highly recommend this approach.

And for anyone twiddling their thumbs today and wishing to brush up on their Latin, I took a picture of this plaque the last time I was at the BBC (ahem) and though I think I may have asked you before I have forgotten what you said, so any ideas?? I can see something about beauty in there...and possibly truth and wisdom... and Miss Vanstone from Nonsuch Girls, if you are reading this (very possible), I know I know, you tried your best, I should have paid attention.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

'You must ask yourself, when you envisage yourself opening a bookshop, what your objective really is.'

I'm losing count of the number of times I have read The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, but I had read it again prior to my recent trip to London and the wander around Hampstead with Justine Picardie which included paying homage at Penelope Fitzgerald's grave, and I've just read it yet again because I didn't write my thoughts down at the time, and each time it's as if I read a new book.

I think I might be in danger of repetition to the power of ten here about the moment in my reading life when, back in December 2003, The Bookshop was my introduction to the writing of an author who I think you all know by now I admire most above all others. I have also taken that adulation as far as creating a file for snippets and articles, and building up a set of hardback first editions. Several of those signed in Penelope Fitzgerald's very distinctive handwriting, which is the highest accolade that can be bestowed in the dovegreyreader pantheon of greats when there are also eye-wateringly steep gas bills to be paid.

Self-effacing and modest Florence Green, acutely aware of her own failings, decides against all the odds to open a bookshop in the East Anglian market town of Hardborough. No push over and doggedly determined when she needs to be, Florence also knows when it is time to retire gracefully, eventually defeated by the community but never cowed by it. That's the plot in a tiny netsuke, (can you tell I'm reading The Hare With Amber Eyes and learning to pronounce it as netskeh) a plot I know so well, but if you've read it you'll know that much more happens than this and I am always amazed at how successive readings can also be completely different readings of the same book. Previously unnoticed nuances emerge, perhaps subtle and gentle (and to me Penelope Fitzgerald is always both of those) developments of character or plot that I may not have appreciated before. This time I was marvelling at the trickle of characters whose presence is firmly established by page twenty one as the world surrounding Florence Green is effortlessly populated.

It's seems to have been the week of the child on here and I've really enjoyed reflecting and writing about a child's point of view in recent reading, so in keeping with that the character who I indentified with most on this reading was by chance a ten and a half year old girl. Christine arrives brimming with that confidence that only ten and a half year olds can have as she offers her services to Florence in the shop, coming to work for her after school each day.

' Christine liked to do the locking up. At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done. This would be her last year at Primary. The shadow of her eleven plus, at the end of the next summer was already felt.'

I wonder if you can remember being ten and a half?

Please forgive the self-indulgence because funnily enough I can, and with crystal clarity after Penelope Fitzgerald had described it so succinctly, and I would have given away my roller skates to work in a bookshop. It's that year when you are top dog at primary school but about to embark on the great leveller that is secondary school and have to start working your way up all over again. I might have been the fastest runner in the school but I was about to become the slowest, I might have been one of the best readers and spellers coming top in everything, but I was about to be suitably cut down to size, and apart from the occasional fluke I'm not sure I ever came top or excelled in much again except for one season as hockey captain and holding the school record for running 150 yards for about a week.

This being me I have the embarrassing photographic evidence which I think demonstrates that transition...

Me at ten and a half...

and then about a year later and in my first term at grammar school...

Apart from the fact I had sensibly ditched the alice band, something very subtle seems to have altered, about my face, my eyes and my smile. It's always hard to see it in yourself but the closer I looked the more I could sense the older me, more cautious, more reserved, perhaps more guarded and nothing like as confident as I was when sporting that orange jumper my mum had made me. I'm definitely back down in the pecking order again.

Penelope Fitzgerald does fictional children so well. You only have to read her collected letters to sense how close and involved she was in the lives of her own children and grandchildren and Christine is a perfect example of all that observational skill used to good effect yet with much economy of detail.

I browse Penelope Fitzgerald's letters almost constantly to discover her thoughts about everything, it's all in there not least her thoughts about her own books, and of The Bookshop she cites Balzac as the 'presiding genius of this little book'. I'm thinking back to my reading of Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, simple characters and plot yet complex and dynamic for all that simplicity, and dare I say how much better Penelope Fitzgerald is at those gaps and silences than the rather garrulous Monsieur Balzac.

The letters display the customary modesty that I associate with Penelope Fitzgerald, humble to the point of feeling unworthy of the attention but always with a wonderfully droll edge to the humour.

This in a letter to her editor at Macmillan, Richard Garnett,

'It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer and I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose your amateur status?'

and this to Richard Ollard her editor at Collins, where Penelope Fitzgerald had moved with her subsequent Booker winning novel Offshore after feeling unwanted at Duckworth

'The TLS was also very kind to The Bookshop and said it was a novella in the tradition of Henry James, not a selling point perhaps.'

I'm now very wary of setting myself New Year reading challenges which have faded and dwindled by the last week of January, but I can see no harm in promising myself a timely re-read of all Penelope Fitzgerald's novels through this coming year, because having re-read The Bookshop I think new and unknown delights wait me, but hopefully no more embarrassing pictures.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

It is ten years today since the death of one of my most favourite writers, Penelope Fitzgerald so it seems fitting to remember her here and my thanks to Peter, a reader here, who is visiting her grave in London sometime this week and leaving some flowers there on behalf of all lovers of her writing, a really lovely gesture.My thanks also to Terry Dooley, Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in law and literary
executor, for directions to his old family home in our nearest village and the place that
Penelope adored so much. I had often wondered which one it was so I
wandered up there late in the afternoon in glorious sunshine and took a
few pictures.Everywhere looking very sleepy around the
newly-mown churchyard and I hope this is the right cottage, I tried to
be a bit discreet about snapping someone's family home... ...and not difficult to see why Penelope loved this
spot as much as she did.

'They live in a cottage with
honeysuckle at one side of the front door and a rose at the other...the
kitchen built out at the back looks over green pastures...'

From
there Penelope Fitzgerald would have certainly enjoyed this view across
to the Church of St Constantine and St Aegedius, we do like our saints
to be a bit out of the ordinary here in Devon.And the tiled church floor surely begs a quilt

And there, Penelope's timeless view across the Village
Green and those gracefully hipped Lutyens' roofs again and the squat
chimneys that she felt sure mirrored the scale of the church tower. This
is where the workers for the Duke of Bedford's Endsleigh Estate lived
and from where they would walk the two miles across the fields to work. Perhaps saddest of all on this wander, I espied a newer grave with carefully placed memorial seat alongside and overlooking the Green; one of the Kayaker's school friends (and namesake, both Christian and middle name) who was tragically killed in a terrible car accident just outside the village a while ago. His grave looks almost longingly across to his old family home, next door to the Dooley's home, and he would doubtless have been one of those children Penelope watched playing there, as ours did on long summer evenings all those years ago...

'At the end of the churchyard there is a steep drop, with a flight of stone steps, down to the Green, the centre of all things for Milton Abbot's not very many young children. This is an echoing green, as in Blake's vision, and when it darkens the last game of three-a-side football trails into silence.'

... and quite unexpected tears pricked my eyes as I read the simple engraving on his headstone ...

'Sadly not indestructible'

From time immemorial anyone who has raised adventurous sons will understand the truth and the fear behind those incredibly poignant words and I sat for a moment and thought about his family and mine, and the joy of having lived and raised our children here, and of course I thought about Penelope Fitzgerald and what inspiration she may have gathered from this special place, and I was thankful.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

At last it's happened, a dedicated website to the life and work of Penelope Fitzgerald and a great big cheer to the team in the US who have set this up. Somehow this still makes me feel that we don't understand or appreciate Penelope Fitzgerald quite as much as many feel she deserves here in the UK. That online presence has been a long time coming and just reading how insufferably Penelope Fitzgerald was treated when she won the Booker prize for Offshore leads me to wonder sometimes at the machinations of the literary establishment.So I Have Thought of You the recent volume of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters is gathering interesting reviews and some criticism for its chronology. Letters are grouped according to the correspondent and the website has already provided a forum for the debate of this approach with input from Terry Dooley, son-in-law of Penelope Fitzgerald and editor of the volume.To be honest the actual chronology of a book of letters is not something I've paid a huge amount of attention to in the past. I just read them and enjoy them in whatever context they are offered and accept what I'm given, assume it was deemed best given the material there was to work with.A lovely Woman's Hour interview here with Julian Barnes and Penelope's daughter Tina.Tina talks about her very unusual childhood and the very different mother that Penelope was. Her late-flowering writing career is carefully outlined and Penelope's intellectual but highly impractical nature emerges beautifully. There's even Penelope herself talking to Jenny Murray in an interview years ago, so any fans out there absolutely don't miss it. I've read all Penelope Fitzgerald's books now except for Innocence which I've been saving and saving almost fearing that moment when I've read them all.I shall just have to go back to the beginning and start all over again, my first was The Bookshop, my second The Gate of Angels, that's how clearly I recall first reading Penelope Fitzgerald.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

It must be at least a month since I've uttered the name Penelope Fitzgerald on here, so time to place her unashamedly centre stage once more, focus the spotlight and share very good news if you haven't heard already.Actually I suspect Penelope Fitzgerald would hate that amount of fuss and bother so we'll settle for a quiet seat around the kitchen table instead of a great big fanfare.It was the Endsleigh Salon last night and this month's theme A Favourite Book, so I took along House of Air, the Collected Writings of Penelope Fitzgerald especially as we find ourselves sitting in her favourite place,

'It can't be a favourite place unless you've been happy there. The place I want to describe is the village of Milton Abbot' The Moors (House of Air p443)

Since her death I have been waiting an age for some vestige of literary tribute to appear. We've had House of Air and could do with another one of those, there must be more, but I understood a biography was 'being written' and no sign of that yet. However big treats in store in 2008.
So I Have Thought of You, The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald is to be published by Fourth Estate in May.Letters to friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues will all feature.This year I read The Blue Flower for the first time. I'm odd like this. I've had The Blue Flower and Innocence unread, rationed for special reading moments, knowing that once I've read them that's it, I've read all that Penelope Fitzgerald wrote and that moment of first reading will be over for ever. Of course I can read them all over and over again and have done that with several but there's nothing like that first read. Sometimes, if you are fortunate enough to detect the pulse of a book, then it beats in time with your own heart, there's a sense of synchronicity and you just know something special has happened.That happens to me every time I read Penelope Fitzgerald.The Blue Flower took my breath away as does all her writing; even the books considered lesser in the grand scheme of things have sufficient in them to stand out from the crowd. I didn't even review The Blue Flower on here because I didn't actually think I could do it justice.From the first quote by F. von Hardenberg, later Novalis,

'Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history'

I barely surfaced.Hardly any underlining, the book was a perfect whole and such a complete reading moment that I couldn't even bring myself to dissect it down into 'this was a brilliant read because...'.

Even A.N.Wilson agreed,

"this is such a clever book but it wears its cleverness lightly...Fitzgerald seems to be one of those rare artists gifted with both the knowledge of how things are anf the skill to record what she knows with subtlety and devastating truthfulness."

So what of the forthcoming letters? 400 pages of the kindness and thoughtfulness of Penelope Fitzgerald,
the astute and penetrating observations, the wisdom and the gentle compassion has me completely beside myself with
anticipation.I have my name on a copy before the ink is even dry.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Own up, I bet you've all been wondering how long it would be before I posted about a Persephone book because yes, I do have virtually all of them and have been gathering them since the year dot.Here's an old picture because you do one of two things with a collection like this;separate shelves creating feature or merge.I've since gone for merge and this cabinet now the home of Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Bernice Rubens et al.I'm an occasional Persephone reader now, just one maybe two every so often because I've realised I'm a danger to myself with books like this.You must know me by now, I can buy into nostalgia at the merest hint of afternoon tea and scones especially if served by a housemaid but the trouble is then I get stuck in a time warp and before you know it I'm off to count the linen and worrying about whether nanny has the children ready to take for a walk before nursery tea.It's far too easy to do when you live in a country cottage setting.Too many Persephone reads in succession and I'm in trouble and having difficulty sorting out which world I live in. An undeniable hankering after embroidered tablecloths, knitted teacosies and spoons in the jam quickly follows.As the Gamekeeper (son of dgr) wanders in and slaps a dead rabbit (paunched not skinned) on the table right next to the triple-tiered cake stand I'll have hysterics and scream "take it to cook this minute" followed by an attack of the vapours.So rationing is for my own good and the well-being of others chez dgr who do not appreciate the nuances and gentility of a fine lace doily.Robert Hewison would argue that I'm sensible to do that; although he would suggest that preserving the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self (that justifies the contents of our loft then) too much nostalgia also has its dangers and he elaborates very thought-provokingly in his book The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline which is quite a revealing expose of the growth,manufacture and marketing of heritage.

"Nostalgic memory should not be confused with true recall. For the individual, nostalgia filters out unpleasant aspects of the past and our former selves, creating a self-esteem that helps us to rise above the anxieties of the present.Collectively, nostalgia supplies the deep links that identify a particular generation; nationally it is the source of binding social myths".

Clearly I need saving from myself.However, along comes House-Bound by Winifred Peck with an afterword by Penelope Fitzgerald and I think, oh hang it all, just a quick fix won't harm, let me ring the bell for the tea trolley.
Winifred Peck was of the Knox family, sister to the brothers written about so knowingly by Penelope Fitzgerald in her biography The Knox Brothers because one of them, Edmund (known as Evoe), was Penelope's father.By all accounts they were a truly remarkable family so it's easy to see what a rich source of talent there was for Penelope Fitzgerald to inherit.Yet in many ways all this highlights Winifred's invisibility in the family line up because I've had the book on my shelves for years (treasured signed first edition) and I had never noticed that there were two seemingly silent unnamed daughters in amongst the well-labelled sons.That's Winifred in the back row.First published in 1942 by Faber, House-Bound is ostensibly a book about the maelstrom of war for a well-to-do family in Castleburgh (a fictional Edinburgh) but within that Rose battles her own war with her house as the enemy.It bullies and cajoles her as she is overwhelmed with the duties she must perfom in the absence of any maids. While "Empires might rock and kingdoms fall" Rose meets "her Waterloo with a tin of Vim" and husband Stuart steadfastly remains "a great, idle, hulking fellow" congenitally incapable of even polishing his own shoes.His worst nightmare realized as he declares to Rose in abject horror "I can't have you opening the door to tradespeople".As the new world order emerges so does a new way of thinking and Penelope Fitzgerald in her excellent afterword sums it up as only she could and perhaps she was thinking along the same lines as Robert Hewison"There is nostalgia here, Winnie would never have denied that.But there is also the confidence to leave the past where it belongs and to make a reasonable job of the future"

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Still sharing my love of all things Penelope Fitzgerald I can't go an inch further without mentioning A House of Air: Selected Writings , which I keep downstairs near my desk, and the US version The Afterlife which I keep upstairs by the bed.There's no particular reason for that beyond the fact that I read the upstairs one more often and it has stayed in one piece; sadly my £20 hardback U.K. Flamingo edition must have been glued with a Pritt stick because it's falling apart.Contained in both editions though a fine piece entitled The Moors in which Penelope Fitzgerald cites our nearest village, Milton Abbot, as her "favourite place".When a writer describes a place you think you know well you realize that actually you don't know it that well at all. Writers have an unerring eye and they use it for our benefit, I dash up there to the post office and ashamedly take little notice.So it was on a chill but sunny evening that I wandered across there with my camera and a copy of The Moors to walk in the footsteps of someone who had looked with that observant, knowledgeable and understanding eye and spotted everything I have missed or taken for granted over the years.A good example, I had never but never noticed the rooks.I even wondered whether I'd be able to find the rookery, where on earth was it? As I parked the car and got out it was very obvious from the noise that it was right above my head and always has been.

"It is a village built on a slope...and sheltering round a noble fifteenth-century church, St Constantine's"

"This church is built of the beautiful local Hurdwick stone, green in colour - 'underwater green' it has been called"

"At the end of the churchyard there is a steep drop with a flight of stone steps, down to the Green"

"The village has been lucky enough to keep all its English elms, and the rookery with them"

"To the west, beyond the elms, the view opens towards the Cornish moors, scattered with rocks"

"If you look around the village you will see at once how Lutyens's favoured hipped roofs are exactly suited to the plunging sweep of the Green while the square chimney stacks - reasonably low for an Arts and
Crafts man - stand out against the open sky like a modest echo of the
church tower itself"

Monday, April 09, 2007

I have an online reading friend across the pond and south a bit who is sending eager messages saying she has just "got" Penelope Fitzgerald and is busy buying the entire oeuvre, so this is a moment of great rejoicing because not everyone gets Penelope Fitzgerald. Also a self-indulgent excuse to stroke my treasured first editions, some signed, and I don't go to these extremes for many writers.I witter on about her endlessly and tirelessly to all and sundry and t'will ever be so, but people often come back to me and say "so what was that all about then?" I used to shrug and so "oh well never mind" because it's actually quite difficult to define, but that's not good enough now I'm a book blogger so I'll have to do better.I found my way into Penelope Fitzgerald's writing via The Bookshop. It must have been one of those days when the reading planets were aligned in my favour but I emerged after finishing the book in one sitting knowing that I had discovered a truly great writer.It was a strange feeling.I may have cracked it by happenstance and just by starting with exactly the right book and I'm beginning to think there is a method to this with many writers.Look at my lifetime of issues with Beryl? Then suddenly along comes Master Georgie and perhaps I've finally unlocked the Bainbridge enigma.It's difficult to encapsulate what it is Penelope Fitzgerald does so well and that I admire so much, but baptizing a new convert is always a good moment to reflect. It's clearly many things but in amongst them I think it's all about what isn't said.Thrifty and sparing with her words, nothing to excess and I realize now that this is a real gift of respect to her reader.Sufficient offered for the reader who is tuned into the right frequency to pick up everything left unsaid and fill in the gaps for themselves.So you'd think being such a fanatic I'd read everything she's ever written wouldn't you? Well not quite, I've rationed and saved two knowing that what we have is all there is and nothing can quite replace that elation of a first read of a Penelope Fitzgerald book.With a new and keen convert nipping at my heels to talk about the books I could feel myself weakening by the day, The Blue Flower or Innocence?I settled on The Blue Flower and have been transported back into that perfect literary world that only Penelope Fitzgerald can create.I read it slowly (never rush a Penelope) in two languorously self-indulgent sittings.More about this one soon.I have on hand a book by Professor Peter Wolfe Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald and
it's a godsend for anyone wanting to delve a little deeper into the
work of a writer who "has a great gift for imagining herself in other
people's shoes without patronizing them" and whose "art rests on a
bedrock of knowledge as firm as it is wide". Pre-requisite for me before any delving was to have read all the books once for the sheer scale and enjoyment of a writer of great but unassuming intellect.Now I plan to start back at the beginning and follow the progression and development in Penelope Fitzgerald's writing as well as plumbing the hidden depths.I'll share my new understanding on here as I go, first up The Golden Child and, with the return of the Tutankhamun exhibition to London later this year, what could be more appropriate.

PS I've had a lovely e mail off-blog reminding me about this great interview on Amazon by Kerry Fried with Penelope Fitzgerald. It was the first piece I found when I had put The Bookshop down and started to look up anything about this amazing writer and it was reading this interview that made me realise I had to read more.Thanks Kerry you did me a great favour that day!

Constants...

Team Tolstoy

Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.

Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

Port Eliot Festival

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